How to burn out your DBA team

How to burn out your DBA as quickly as possible

Are you trying to get rid of your DBA – or DBA team? Want to make a reputation for your IT shop that will make recruitment borderline impossible? Simply want to make somebody’s life miserable? Then this article is for you!

(Note If you want a happy DBA that stays with you, do the opposite.)

Put your DBA on call 24×7
1. Nobody wants solo responsibility for a system. People like to go to dinner… a movie… a vacation… sleep… and should be allowed to.
No backup DBA team
1. This is a corollary to #1. Of course, if you have no backup DBA, #1 is easy.
Make your DBA work long hours
1. 80-hour weeks happen sometimes, but after a while, it gets old
Lots of weekend / late night patching and deployment
1. Many sites have this one down pat… they have a Friday night (or weekend) deployment every week, with all hands on deck. This is a great way to make people update their resumes. They work hard all week, then at the peak of exhaustion, they have to perform a task which requires high concentration and late hours, followed by another long week.
Additional tasks with no training
1. Good ideas are upgrades, new features, migrations, and implementing high-availability systems, as well as monitoring same
Blame the DBA team for everything
1. Some shops even have rooms dedicated to this – often called a “War Room” – where the stated purpose is to diagnose issues but the end result is often finger pointing.
Long commutes
1. This is most prevalent in large cities (NYC, Atlanta, LA), where commutes in the 1-2 hour range are not unusual. We recently hired a NYC DBA who was commuting 2.25 hours every day, in EACH direction, from central NJ. Bonus: Add #3 to this (long hours) for extra special burn-out.

Retaining your DBAs

For starters, do the opposite of all the above.

On top of that, consider a hiring a backup team of expert DBAs (like us). This get you:

Business continuity (in case they jointly win the lottery, buy an island, and toss their cell phones into the ocean)
Depth of knowledge (chances are, we’ve done it before)
Breadth of knowledge (…and in most industries)
Evening and weekend coverage
Expert-level assistance, on demand (also, we’re all on shore).